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What is your opinion on the "Philoso-literists" such as Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre? Do they fit at all inside the western canon or are they more a part of the western Philosophy canon?
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Aug 17, 2009 21:45
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Magic Hate Ball posted:What should I know about Richard III before seeing it? For starters: Richard III is Shakespeare's most popularly adapted play, though I think the reasons for this have more to do with expedience of production than audience response (although, to be fair, audiences like the play a great deal). Its most conspicuous characteristic, at least from a production standpoint, is that you really only need one good actor: Richard. Everyone else is a minor character. Some of them get good lines, but only one of them (George, Duke of Clarence) gets a terribly difficult speech. The other odd thing that comes out in production is that Ricard III is like Hamlet in some basic respects. Both are long plays, though Hamlet is somewhat longer. And the leading character in both plays speaks something well over half the lines -- the operant difference between them is that, because of Hamlet's length, even a small proportion of the speaking lines still gives enough space to develop a character like Claudius, Gertrude, or Ophelia. This isn't the case in Richard. Richard III is, also, typical of Shakespeare's early histories and tragedies -- it's in may respects a straight up imitation of Marlowe's Jew of Malta or (to a lesser extent) Tamburlaine. In all of them, a charismatic, powerful, and villainous character takes the stage, declares his intentions to some terrible deed, and invites the audience to see how it plays out. These aren't just villains. These are villains who love to plot, love to conquer, and love to invite the audience to watch them do it. So a production of Richard largely succeeds or fails based on how well Richard draws you into his plotting, and how much this helps you root for him (even though you know that, like Godzilla or invading aliens, he's going to get taken down). It also succeeds or fails based on how well it handles what's arguably the worst scene in all of Shakespeare: V. v., where Richard spontaneously develops a conscience and gives a terrible, terrible speech ("what do I fear? Myself?"). It's like that scene in Return of the King where Gollum argues with himself, except somehow more tedious and with less dramatic weight. There is simply no way for even a gifted actor to run this scene effectively, so most good productions either heavily cut it or twist the staging in an unconventional way. And last thing: Richard begins dynamically, but starts to drag in or around Act III -- this has everything to do with the play text. So it's worth watching how the production deals with this. Most of the time, Acts I and II go on uncut while material is taken out of the later play, which seems wise. This can damage the play's structure, though, which is built around an initial act that happens in the first two acts (e.g. the wooing of Anne) and replayed with a difference in the last two (e.g. the wooing of Elizabeth). So these cuts can get complicated.
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Aug 18, 2009 18:53
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Funktor posted:Good to know. And actually, the graphic novel question is a good one. Have you read/taught any? Thoughts? I've read plenty of graphic novels and plenty of comics, though I used to read more than I do now. Most of that has to do with one of my best friends, who's now an editor at Marvel and more comic-literate (or has better taste in comics) than his title might suggest. We lived together for something like four years, and much of what I read either came out of his collection or was by his recommendation. Also, we're both Lit. people by training. That shapes how we talk. I've taught Fun Home before -- in a short unit on the memoir -- and I might do it again. But I don't think I'd ever teach what most of the comic world maintains as classics: Maus, Watchmen, and so on. I've complained before that the comic world -- and most comic writing -- is painfully insular, and I'll stand by that. Most comics classics operate by reorienting complex devices whose understanding wants some extensive background reading and acculturation. Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, and so on are largely significant because they tell what they understand to be a familiar story in a different way. While this works great for an audience of lifelong or long-term comic readers, it also very much limits itself to that audience. That, in turn, means that these books would be difficult to teach even if I were highly motivated to -- I mean, think about the amount of background reading someone who'd never picked up a comic would have to do to get Watchmen. We'd need some early Peacemaker, Captain America, and Fury and his Howling Commandos books for starters, because otherwise the Comedian's iconography doesn't make any sense. And you'd actually have to go back to Charleton(!)'s Blue Beetle to get Nite Owl and Rorshach. Granted, Watchmen does some of this digging for you, but that's still a good amount of reading -- and probably insufficient -- to get someone the background that Watchmen largely assumes they already have. And of course this background is largely Watchmen-specific. It's not going to help someone read, say, Tom Strong. I'm not saying that a steep learning curve or background reading makes a book unteachable, although sometimes it does. But it does mean that there are comparatively few classes where such a book is the best choice. Were I teaching Watchmen to novice comic readers, I guess about 2 1/2 weeks from background reading to last page. That's a tremendous liability.
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Aug 18, 2009 19:55
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oliwan posted:This thread is keeping me from my MA dissertation on Ian McEwan, who is, mind you, probably the best British writer since the 70s. I'm with you on Coetzee at least. Waiting for the Barbarians is about twenty kinds of great book. quote:Anyway, good thread! I'm gonna do a year of teaching high school, and writing a PhD proposal during that time. As for my high school students I say this: It is never too early for Foucault and Barthes!! I dare you -- no. I triple dog dare you -- to bring Barthes into a room full of high school students. I can't guess what'll happen, but it's got to be interesting. Like feeding a goat a pouch of Big League Chew.
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Aug 18, 2009 20:59
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Ironis posted:Down to my actual question though: I recently finished Don Quixote after about 3 months, and was wondering if you could give me your general impressions. Everything I have read - including the opening essay by Mr. Bloom - heaps praise on it. I found the writing was very good, and taken individually pieces of the book were brilliant, but the reason it took me so long to finish was that I didn't find it at all compelling. Once I put it down I had no desire whatsoever to pick it back up. Am I missing something here? I don't think so. Quixote has about the same formal structure as Anchorman -- both are basically disjointed, episodic texts in which individual episodes are entertaining, but are unconnected by narrative of any great strength. Like an old-style sitcom. This means that there's no suspense, no character development, and none of a host of other things we modern readers expect from a text. That doesn't mean it's not good. It just means that Quixote is closer to a collection of related short stories than a novel proper, which is another way of saying that the narrative doesn't keep you asking specific questions about where it'll go next.
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Aug 18, 2009 21:08
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Brainworm posted:I'm with you on Coetzee at least. Waiting for the Barbarians is about twenty kinds of great book. My love for Coetzee knows no bounds. I think he is without question the best writer to receive the nobel prize. Yes, Waiting for the Barbarians is amazing, but the crazy thing is that every book of his is a masterpiece, maybe with the slight exception of Slow Man, but hey, it was hard top follow up on Disgrace. Goddamn he is so good. Foe? How can you be so genius? Also, his (literary) criticism is out of this world. quote:I dare you -- no. I triple dog dare you -- to bring Barthes into a room full of high school students. I can't guess what'll happen, but it's got to be interesting. Like feeding a goat a pouch of Big League Chew. Well, the thing is, I never wanted to teach high school, so at least I'm going to make it interesting. I actually think Barthes is quite accessible for a class of high school kids -- stuff like Mythologies. However, once they have done that, we'll move on to S/Z. Oh, and after they've had enough of Barthes, the homework for next week will be Of Grammatology. Good times.
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Aug 18, 2009 21:19
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Watchmen is extremely valuable in courses on media theory, as much of it is concerned with the ways we hyperstimulated humans chop up information in order to process it in discrete bits, and how we attempt to reintegrate it afterwards. It pairs best with Burroughs' Nova Express, which it references both explicitly and obliquely, and is a good link in the chain stretching from gramophony, early cinema, and wireless down to digital narrative. Brainworm posted:I don't think so. Quixote has about the same formal structure as Anchorman -- both are basically disjointed, episodic texts in which individual episodes are entertaining, but are unconnected by narrative of any great strength. Like an old-style sitcom. What frame the Quixote has is mostly from the running joke of the novel being Cervantes' presentation of an edited version (whether by Cervantes or another editor) of an anonymous "translation" of the original Arabic manuscript, and much of the book's humor is in the interplay of these elements. So in many ways it ports over the structure of the Thousand and One Nights, except that its primary movement is not through various layers of narration (though it does that too), but through various layers of bibliography.
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Aug 18, 2009 22:28
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Wolfgang Pauli posted:Every professor at my school serves as an academic advisor for a section of students majoring inside that department. Do you do anything like that? I do exactly that. The way our college works, every faculty member is advises two groups of students: Freshmen (based on their expressed interests in different programs) and declared majors (based on not just their major, but what they want to do afterward; that is, we do "career" pairing as well as major pairing). I try to get my non-major advisees together at least a few times a semester -- usually dinner at my house, which is just a couple blocks from campus. And I meet with each of them every couple or three weeks, just to check up on how they're doing and make sure they're on track for non-curricular stuff (preparing for fellowships, thinking about jobs or grad school, and so on). I play the same with my Major advisees, except that I have most of them in one class or another, so the meetings are more frequent and less formal. And, again as part of the advising duties, I run open workshops on grad school in English -- what it's all about, the stats on how long it takes, who gets what kinds of jobs, and so forth. It's easy to find the MLA data on these, so I walk them through how to sort them, plus how to sort other publicly available data (attrition/retention, job placement). And, last, I'm our contact person for the Rhodes Scholars program. I work with Athletics on other matters, so I'm always seeking out student athletes who might be a good fit, and helping them prep their applications.
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Aug 18, 2009 23:05
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oliwan posted:What I want to say is, if you like this stuff, get into English at a good university. Everyone will be a Brainworm, only some even more experienced Ah. They key word here is "good." I'd make the sentence "a good program" and not "a good university." A good program, that's easier to define. A telling test of program quality is whether you can knock on a professor's door, absent an appointment, and she or he will both be there and willing to talk to you, even if she or he doesn't know you or have you in class. Obviously, people won't be in their offices while they're teaching or in meetings, so you'll never get it perfect. But a program where people aren't available in person for several hours a day, that's not a place to be.
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Aug 18, 2009 23:27
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Doran Blackdawn posted:What is your opinion on the "Philoso-literists" such as Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre? Do they fit at all inside the western canon or are they more a part of the western Philosophy canon? I think you can safely split them between canons, but in different ways. Nietzsche, at least insofar as he fits a literary canon, is more of a critic. I'm not sure a survey of criticism -- and especially Shakespearean criticism -- is complete without him. It's probably not complete without Freud, either. Sartre, on the other hand, is more traditionally literary. I'm not sure you could talk about the modern (post-modern) novel (anti-novel) without bringing in La Nausée or, more specifically, Lloyd Alexander's translation of it, which is stylistically remarkable -- actually, a work of art distinct from Sartre's project, sort of like Ciardi's translations of Dante.
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Aug 19, 2009 20:31
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oliwan posted:My love for Coetzee knows no bounds. [...] Also, his (literary) criticism is out of this world. You speak my mind here. I don't teach creative writing, but if I did Coetzee's criticism would be syllabus day one. He's an object lesson on how good writers are necessarily good readers. And, not that Stephen King is J.M. Coetzee, Danse Macabre is a great loving example of the same thing. And it makes a good counterpoint. If you want to write bestsellers, be a great loving reader. If you want to write for prizes, be a great loving reader. Without that, you're just setting ink to paper. quote:Well, the thing is, I never wanted to teach high school, so at least I'm going to make it interesting. I actually think Barthes is quite accessible for a class of high school kids -- stuff like Mythologies. However, once they have done that, we'll move on to S/Z. Oh, and after they've had enough of Barthes, the homework for next week will be Of Grammatology. Good times. Barthes probably is. So is Derrida. But I'm not sure accessibility matters. Not all of your students will get what you need them to, and that's fine, as long as you're committed to getting them as far as they want to go. They need to know what's out there, what interests them, what they need to learn in order to do it. I am curious about the leeway you seem to have, though. My understanding of HS English is that curricula are set outside the classroom. I mean, were I teaching HSE, I'd assume that any extra, worthwhile texts would have to be part of a reading group instead of class proper.
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Aug 19, 2009 20:52
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elentar posted:Watchmen is extremely valuable in courses on media theory, as much of it is concerned with the ways we hyperstimulated humans chop up information in order to process it in discrete bits, and how we attempt to reintegrate it afterwards. It pairs best with Burroughs' Nova Express, which it references both explicitly and obliquely, and is a good link in the chain stretching from gramophony, early cinema, and wireless down to digital narrative. I like this. I like it a lot. We don't currently have any courses on media theory, so I'm not accustomed to thinking of how texts might fit into that framework. But that curricular space seems like a good place for Watchmen. Again, anything I've said about that text needs a giant asterisk, since I read it before I set foot behind the podium -- I think it was about 1998. So I'ma get back on and see what I can orbit around it. On asking, it's a popular enough text among a diversity of students here, and would work well enough with media theory, that it seems worth piloting a course something like what you've described. quote:What frame the Quixote has is mostly from the running joke of the novel being Cervantes' presentation of an edited version (whether by Cervantes or another editor) of an anonymous "translation" of the original Arabic manuscript, and much of the book's humor is in the interplay of these elements. So in many ways it ports over the structure of the Thousand and One Nights, except that its primary movement is not through various layers of narration (though it does that too), but through various layers of bibliography. All true, and something I should have brought in. This is part of what Danielewski plays on in House of Leaves, which I read as partly a rewriting of Cervantes. It's actually really interesting to read Quixote like it's a novel with distinctly postmodern priorities (you can do the same with Tristram Shandy or Anatomy of Melancholy or anything by Nashe); it shows you just how useful, confusing, artificial, and complicated things get when you map textual practices onto an historical timeline.
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Aug 19, 2009 22:08
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I was trying to catch up by reading though the whole thread, but I have a question that just came up. I'm an undergraduate physics major enrolled in the first English class required for the major and the minor (I'm considering an English Literature minor). The class is called Introduction to Critical Reading. Well, everything was good, until the book list came. Apparently my section (and only my section) requires feminist readings, such as "Foundations of Patriarchy" and "Male Domination". Now I don't really have a problem with feminist theory or the class being on it, but one of my closest (female) friends, as well as my mom, are telling me that I probably shouldn't take it (I am a male, dunno if that has anything to do with it). I guess I'm just really not sure if I should try to find a different section or not. Regardless, I'm going the first day, to see how it is. So... what is your opinion on this?
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Aug 20, 2009 02:26
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Look Around You, what exactly are you asking for, his opinions on feminist writing as a whole? That's pretty huge. Also, you might want to elaborate on why you see "feminist" and immediately think "uh oh, bad." ...even though I do the same sometimes since I read Laugh of the Medusa oh god Also, not to derail, but do you go to Pitt? We have that class title and our text list just came out. If you like I could get you more info on what the class is like, I definitely know some people who have taken it. Let me know via PM or something. pyknosis fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Aug 20, 2009 |
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Aug 20, 2009 02:37
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Look Around You posted:I was trying to catch up by reading though the whole thread, but I have a question that just came up. I'm an undergraduate physics major enrolled in the first English class required for the major and the minor (I'm considering an English Literature minor). The class is called Introduction to Critical Reading. Well, everything was good, until the book list came. Apparently my section (and only my section) requires feminist readings, such as "Foundations of Patriarchy" and "Male Domination". Now I don't really have a problem with feminist theory or the class being on it, but one of my closest (female) friends, as well as my mom, are telling me that I probably shouldn't take it (I am a male, dunno if that has anything to do with it). I guess I'm just really not sure if I should try to find a different section or not. Regardless, I'm going the first day, to see how it is. So... what is your opinion on this? I have no idea what you are saying here. Why shouldn't you take it? This is a very confusing post. Bye the way, I am a male, and I specialize in gender studies, of which feminism is obviously a big part. Feminism is not hurr hurr hairy armpits you know. On top of that, feminist/gender readings are a central part of critical reading, if only because they often focus on reading against the grain, and picking up on hidden ideological assumptions. Or, as they also call it, critical reading.
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Aug 20, 2009 02:59
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Boner Logistics posted:Look Around You, what exactly are you asking for, his opinions on feminist writing as a whole? That's pretty huge. Also, you might want to elaborate on why you see "feminist" and immediately think "uh oh, bad." ...even though I do the same sometimes since I read Laugh of the Medusa oh god Yeah, I do go to Pitt. That would be pretty cool if you could do that. (edit: I don't have PMs, you can email me at lookaroundyou222 at gmail . com or im me at lookaroundyou22 on aim) I'm honestly not afraid of gender studies or feminism or anything, it's more other people telling me not to take it (who are girls) which is confusing me. I also have people telling me to ignore them and take it, which I'm probably going to do. I guess they might be worried about me being a male in a class based on feminism? I'm honestly not sure what their problems are with it really, but I don't see them. Look Around You fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Aug 20, 2009 |
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Aug 20, 2009 03:16
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While we're talking about Mr. Moore, have you read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The variety of literary characters that feature in it get more obscure as the volumes go on. By the third volume, Prospero shows up, along with Orlando (who is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the Orlando from Orlando Innamorato, the Orlando from Orlando Furioso and, well, a few others I don't want to spoil it).
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Aug 20, 2009 03:22
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Look Around You posted:Yeah, I do go to Pitt. That would be pretty cool if you could do that. (edit: I don't have PMs, you can email me at lookaroundyou222 at gmail . com or im me at lookaroundyou22 on aim) Errr, maybe you should ask them why they advise you not to take it? How did that conversation go? You: I'm gonna have a class on feminism! They: Don't take it! You: Okay! They: Want to grab a coffee? Anyway, take the class. It's an important subject!
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Aug 20, 2009 03:32
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Look Around You posted:I was trying to catch up by reading though the whole thread, but I have a question that just came up. I'm an undergraduate physics major enrolled in the first English class required for the major and the minor (I'm considering an English Literature minor). The class is called Introduction to Critical Reading. Well, everything was good, until the book list came. Apparently my section (and only my section) requires feminist readings, such as "Foundations of Patriarchy" and "Male Domination". Now I don't really have a problem with feminist theory or the class being on it, but one of my closest (female) friends, as well as my mom, are telling me that I probably shouldn't take it (I am a male, dunno if that has anything to do with it). I guess I'm just really not sure if I should try to find a different section or not. Regardless, I'm going the first day, to see how it is. So... what is your opinion on this? Well, look. Feminist criticism occupies a place roughly analogous to Postcolonial or Marxist criticism, in the sense that it originated as an interpretive method married to an explicit political agenda. That agenda, at least as far as literature was concerned, was to rewrite the canon in ways that recognized the contributions of female authors, and that allowed textual readings (and reading practices) that integrated modern understandings of women's historical situations and, in more recent scholarship, the social complexities of gender categories. Both of those were, and to some extent remain, absolutely necessary and completely reasonable. But "feminism" as a term has also come to stand for a number of untenable -- and, frankly, largely imaginary -- positions indistinguishable from simple bigotry. I'm not saying that man-hating lit-monsters don't exist, but they're about as common as racists or homophobes or misogynists, and about as well-accepted. So equating feminists and man-haters is something like equating homosexuals and child molesters. They're correlates in popular media, but hardly so in real life. What I can't figure out is the popularity of right-wing antifeminism among middle-class white girls -- it seems to be based on a pervasive and comprehensive set of misunderstandings so tangled I can't even see where they start. The social damage there, I can't fathom it. Anyway. What I'm saying is that there's no reason to expect a hostile atmosphere because you're a man. If you were reading Marx or Foucault or Althusser, I doubt you'd be treated badly because you're bourgeois. If this isn't a skillful professor, you might end up feeling like the token man -- you know, the one who's called on to give the guy's point of view, like you've got a mandate to speak for the rest of us. There are worse places to be. About the only danger I can think of -- and I use the term "danger" loosely -- is that there might be some culture shock. Especially if your physics program was anything like mine. Again, that's good. You'll be fine as long as you remember your classroom manners: seek consensus instead of conflict, treat everyone as equals, speak plainly and honestly, and respect the truth of things -- meaning admit when you've hosed up or gotten something wrong, give credit where people deserve it, and so on. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Aug 20, 2009 |
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Aug 20, 2009 03:41
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Paladin posted:While we're talking about Mr. Moore, have you read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? The variety of literary characters that feature in it get more obscure as the volumes go on. By the third volume, Prospero shows up, along with Orlando (who is Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the Orlando from Orlando Innamorato, the Orlando from Orlando Furioso and, well, a few others I don't want to spoil it). I haven't, but it's been recommended to me about a billion times. This is the first I've heard about Orlando, though.
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Aug 20, 2009 03:44
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Brainworm posted:
This is something that has been bothering me for quite a while now. Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that these girls seem to think that the evil feminists are somehow out to destroy their bourgeois lifestyle of buying nice clothes, and dressing up for the boys? The anti-feminism seems, at least to me, the most popular under 15-22 year old white girls.
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Aug 20, 2009 03:49
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oliwan posted:The anti-feminism seems, at least to me, the most popular under 15-22 year old white girls. I think they are just trying to do everything they can to avoid any remote possibility of being associated with or classified as a man hating hairy armpit terror. To Look Around You, I'm inclined to think you shouldn't worry about it. First of all, are the people telling you not to take it people who have actually taken that specific section of that course? Basically, are they saying don't take it because "oh god feminism and you're a dude", or is it because of something more specific related to the teacher, or coursework required? (as a whole, not just the feminism part) The teacher could be bad for any number of reasons, or that section of the course could just be a much heavier workload than the other sections, but I imagine they would say that if those were the reasons. The course is required by your major, and probably a lot of other majors, I think the class environment will be just like any other section, I highly doubt you'll end up as the only dude in a room full of man hating hairy armpit terrors.
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Aug 20, 2009 04:03
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J posted:I think they are just trying to do everything they can to avoid any remote possibility of being associated with or classified as a man hating hairy armpit terror. My friend just said she's read feminist literature and it was kind of interesting but analyzing it wasn't... my mom didn't give a reason at all. I have read on RMP that the professor is "flaky" and that she makes you read like 8 books for the class but the book list only has 4 and one of them is a play. It also says that she's biased towards males  (Not that I trust RMP all that much, but sometimes it helps a bit)
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Aug 20, 2009 04:35
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oliwan posted:This is something that has been bothering me for quite a while now. Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that these girls seem to think that the evil feminists are somehow out to destroy their bourgeois lifestyle of buying nice clothes, and dressing up for the boys? The anti-feminism seems, at least to me, the most popular under 15-22 year old white girls. I can't even guess. While I was at Lehigh, there was also this thing I think was related. Basically, various elements of the campus culture make date rape and non-date rape exceptionally common. Student responses to it are bizarre. The first case: You might know Lehigh because of the Clery Act -- this is the legislation that mandates colleges issue annual campus security reports, and so named becase of Jeanne Clery, a Lehigh student who was raped and murdered in her dorm room back in the mid '80s. The facts of the case are simple and public. Jeanne was raped and murdered by another Lehigh student, and Lehigh had not disclosed something like forty similar incidents (mostly other sexual assaults) that had been reported to campus police over the prior three years and -- here's the fun part -- had also been perpetrated by students. But the story as it circulates among Lehigh students -- in the face of all the publicly available information, and in spite of all the students seeing Jeanne Clery's story whenever they Google for their college -- is that she was raped and murdered by a townie. And that Lehigh is a high-crime campus because it's in South Bethlehem. Keep in mind that this is the college where a class president robbed a bank to pay his gambling debts. I lived in South Bethlehem for years. Most of it is quiet, latino families who work at the local hospitals -- nurses, med techs, and so on. The only criminals are the students. What I'm saying is that I think college students, for whatever reason, have a tremendous capacity for self-deception. Part of this is developmental -- when you're a teenager, it's easier to think ideologically than in terms of actual observed evidence. This gets me to The second case: As part of a sort of ongoing sexual-assault awareness campaign, one organization at Lehigh invited former students who'd been raped or assaulted on campus to talk in women's dorm wings and sororities -- the intent was to have these volunteers explain what happened to them, what they did at the time, and what, in hindsight, they wish they'd done differently. It was a total loving disaster. In the majority of these talks, the volunteers went through serious abuse -- the female students accusing them of "crying rape," soliciting assault, and so on. I had to escort one of them, a former student of mine and close friend, out of a freshman dorm. It was vicious. The mechanism here is, I think, a bit easier to spot. By casting blame, the female students could write rape, sexual assault, or whatever else as something entirely within their own control -- you know, as long as I don't act this or that way, it won't happen to me. The upshot of both these cases is that you've got students asserting a kind of mythical control over their environment: if you don't want to get raped and murdered, all you have to do is stay on campus and keep your dorm doors locked or, alternately, don't drink too much in front of the wrong people. And students'll respond badly to anything that threatens that myth, because the alternative to it is accepting that they're in a much more threatening place, where women are still subject to terrible treatment through no fault of their own. How this relates with modern feminism is almost clear. Part of it's probably that some feminisms assume a world where, say, sexual assault is outside an individual's locus of control, and that idea is deeply threatening. A second part of it is that some feminisms valorize communities of women, which means that privileged white girls have something essential in common with women unlucky enough to be poor or black -- in that case, feminism becomes a sort of whipping girl for other prejudices.
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Aug 20, 2009 04:41
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Brainworm posted:I like this. I like it a lot. We don't currently have any courses on media theory, so I'm not accustomed to thinking of how texts might fit into that framework. But that curricular space seems like a good place for Watchmen. It's a lot of fun, especially once you get them digging into Friedrich Kittler. I'd be glad to toss in a few more cool things if you are interested in floating the media theory course; I'm getting pulled more and more that way and I'll probably end up applying to Brown's Modern Culture and Media Ph.D program (though I'm still a bit hesitant because it's already hard enough explaining what I do to acquaintances and family members).
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Aug 21, 2009 00:31
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elentar posted:It's a lot of fun, especially once you get them digging into Friedrich Kittler. I'd be glad to toss in a few more cool things if you are interested in floating the media theory course; I'm getting pulled more and more that way and I'll probably end up applying to Brown's Modern Culture and Media Ph.D program (though I'm still a bit hesitant because it's already hard enough explaining what I do to acquaintances and family members). That'd be great. I'd love to take a look at a reading list or a sample syllabus if you've got one handy.
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Aug 21, 2009 02:20
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Why does only the first paragraph of your blog entries show up in my google reader feed? V. annoying to have to click through...
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Aug 21, 2009 05:21
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Defenestration posted:Why does only the first paragraph of your blog entries show up in my google reader feed? V. annoying to have to click through... I have no idea. But I'll see if I can fix it. EDIT: OK. It's fixed, I think. I'ma post something this morning, so let me know if the whole thing doesn't make it to Reader. Brainworm fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Aug 21, 2009 |
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Aug 21, 2009 11:39
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The RSS issue is fixed. The spondee post was full-text in Google Reader.
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Aug 21, 2009 12:42
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writequit posted:The RSS issue is fixed. The spondee post was full-text in Google Reader. Excellent. Thanks. Also: when I teach writing, part of what I teach is use of research, information management, drafting, collaboration, editing, revision, and publishing technologies. And in like three years, Google has gone from nowhere to owning a big piece of all of it. That's probably not a new observation, but it's odd to someone like me. My technological life, it's mostly banging rocks together.
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Aug 21, 2009 16:31
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Brainworm posted:Also: when I teach writing, part of what I teach is use of ... information management Care to elaborate on some of the information management stuff? I've had lots of classes touch on all the other points, but nobody ever really talked about information management at all in any remotely formal capacity.
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Aug 21, 2009 21:43
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I have another question, if it's alright to ask. What did you major/minor in while you were in college? I ask because you mentioned being educated in physics and most people I know who would go towards lit stay far away from stuff like it (I am probably one of the few in my department considering a humanity as a minor [although I must be honest, your thread helped push me over the edge to taking this literature course]).
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Aug 22, 2009 03:36
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J posted:Care to elaborate on some of the information management stuff? I've had lots of classes touch on all the other points, but nobody ever really talked about information management at all in any remotely formal capacity. OK. So in academia, information management means something different than it does in the business world -- not to make distinctions too stark, but business-style information management has to do with institutional decision making, while academic information management has to do with much narrower relationships between information availability and research practices. This is especially true for collaborative research. Getting to how all this works, though, means I've got to walk through some history; modern academic information management really only makes sense if you can see (a) the problems that our current information context poses for students and (b) the problems that this context has either effectively solved or radically changed. So this'll be a long one. Heuristics Anyway. Say you're writing an essay on Cubism. A huge, recent change in academia -- and I mean one that happened while I was in grad school -- is that a baffling array of information on Cubism became instantly available from a variety of reliable academic sources. So now, the real challenge isn't finding information. It's analyzing and synthesizing an intelligently-chosen subset of that information. There are bunches of different strategies for doing this. Some of the most useful are essentially heuristic, like tagmemics, which frames information according to "particle," "wave," and "field" contexts, e.g. "What is Cubism?" "How is Cubism a part of artistic changes over time?" "How does Cubism relate to its economic, social, political, or other contexts?" Well executed, these kinds of heuristics make information selectively relevant and easier to integrate into intellectually useful relationships. Group Things Back When These heuristic strategies for dividing information aren't just important because they allow a single researcher/author to relate pieces of information to one another. They also allow divisions of academic labor that look very different from how they did even a decade ago. Let's assume for a moment that it's 1999, and you and two partners are doing this Cubism project. There are a limited number of ways to divide your research, and all of them are bad. You can check out all the relevant books and journals in the library, and split them between you. You can subdivide the topic into units you think are workable -- say, early, middle, and late Cubism, or French, English, and American cubism. And so on. It should be clear, though, that all these divisions suck rear end. Optimally, of course, you'd divide according to a heuristic that fits what you know of the topic -- using tagmemics as an example, you could go particle/wave/field. But there, you're limited by the nature of your materials. Likely enough, most of them aren't going to fit neatly into any useful heuristic division, so unless you can make oceans of copies, you're stuck with a nearly insoluble problem: you can divide your research according to the disposition of your sources, or according to a good heuristic, but not both. Last, you've got an information sharing problem. You and your partners are researching different parts of this topic (or different collections of sources), but each of you needs a way to let the other two know what you've found -- otherwise, meaningful similarities, differences, or patterns aren't going to emerge in timely enough ways to usefully guide your research. So back when, all of ten years ago, I'd coordinate research only with people at other universities so we could read the same journals or books in parallel. Then, we'd take notes in a document and email that document to other group members on a rigid schedule, so that at the end of each day (or two or three, for large groups) we'd all have a reconciled copy of everything we'd found, and could use that copy to guide what each of us would research next. It's worth noting that this method excluded entire classes of documents from group reading -- anything at, say, the Folger couldn't be read by anyone who wasn't at the Folger. And if someone got off schedule updating the records we were emailing to one another, we had huge delays. (I should add that we messed with mailing lists, CVS, an FTP site, and so on, but this ended up being the least bad option.) And if you go back twenty years -- before the age of widely-available email -- even that kind of coordination was a dream. When I was an undergrad, people still sometimes did this kind of work by fax. Group Things Now Of course now this is all trivial. Any number of people can simultaneously read the same article on, say, JSTOR, or even the same artifact (say, a page from the 1611 King James Bible) on EEBO. That, by itself, means that you can have people easily double or triple up on a line of research (e.g. a six person team can have two people work on each of three article sets, check each other's work, and reconcile whatever). For group notes, we can set up a Google Doc or a wiki. I've been on projects where blogs work well, since you can easily sort posts by date, slap them with like fifty tags, and comment them up. Also, you can bring in the technologically-arrested but still valuable by having them email their posts. The upshot of all this is that I can painlessly plan a book project with, literally, a dozen other people. We start researching a focused topic -- say, 17th century competitive eating -- all read the same narrow set of available primary sources, and wiki our responses together. From that process, we get clear topic divisions and clusters of common interest that can split into sections or chapters, plus a common, comprehensive reference we can use as we write. That kind of deep and sustained collaboration, if it were even widely possible ten years ago, would have been ruthlessly slow and insanely expensive. And it's still relatively novel now. But it also seems clear that this is something like the shape that academic research is going to take for the next however long: the technological hurdles aren't even hurdles, the collaboration produces better work -- you've got more eyes on the same research material and writing processes -- and everything happens faster and cheaper. So What Comes Out of All This? Because of this, I don't really teach "research," since traditional research no longer needs a terribly well-developed skill set. Instead, I teach information management -- basically, ways of sorting information now that most artifact barriers to that sorting (e.g. the inability for two people to read one copy of a book at the same time) have disappeared. And I also teach techniques and technologies that articulate new and useful research methods with different kinds of projects. That's mostly an introduction to ways of finding information (e.g. JSTOR, EEBO), ways of sorting information (e.g. heuristics), ways of sharing knowledge (e.g. wikis), and ways of producing public documents (e.g. collaborative writing). Those are regular parts of my freshman classes, and I find myself refreshing my upper-level students on them, too.
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Aug 22, 2009 04:43
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Look Around You posted:I have another question, if it's alright to ask. What did you major/minor in while you were in college? I ask because you mentioned being educated in physics and most people I know who would go towards lit stay far away from stuff like it (I am probably one of the few in my department considering a humanity as a minor [although I must be honest, your thread helped push me over the edge to taking this literature course]). I started young, and so was an undergrad for a while. I ended up with a BA/BS in English and Physics, with minors in Philosophy and Psychology. But the science/humanities split isn't terribly unusual. My English adviser has a Bachelor's in Chemistry, and our creative writing guy here has a PhD in Psych. on top of his MFA.
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Aug 22, 2009 18:34
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So, at the university where I'm at, they teach these "Freshmen Seminars" which are designed to teach students basic writing - the idea is that any faculty member can teach one on any subject they choose, and it's supposed to get the students reading some sort of sources, discussing them, and outputting some sort of writing. My question is, supposing I were to find myself in charge of something like this, what are the basic writing skills that I would want to try to teach? How does one teach basic writing? On the one hand, teaching something like this would be kind of great since I'd get a chance to work outside of my field (mathematics), but on the other hand, I feel as though I'd be woefully unprepared. Thoughts?
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Aug 23, 2009 03:02
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Have you ever taught a scientific writing class? If you were to do so, is there anything in particular you'd change about your 'information management' approach (aside from the obvious content, journal databases, etc)? Do you have to badger more traditional colleagues into working the way you're describing? The collaborative process you present is frankly far more sophisticated than anything I've encountered in science - literature mining is one thing, but in terms of group collaboration the best we've done is email around a commented-up word document.
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Aug 23, 2009 17:48
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Funktor posted:So, at the university where I'm at, they teach these "Freshmen Seminars" which are designed to teach students basic writing - the idea is that any faculty member can teach one on any subject they choose, and it's supposed to get the students reading some sort of sources, discussing them, and outputting some sort of writing. My question is, supposing I were to find myself in charge of something like this, what are the basic writing skills that I would want to try to teach? How does one teach basic writing? On the one hand, teaching something like this would be kind of great since I'd get a chance to work outside of my field (mathematics), but on the other hand, I feel as though I'd be woefully unprepared. Well, we have a similar program here -- our first-year writing sequence is taught by people in almost every department, and split between interdisciplinary and disciplinary courses. The thing to remember is that writing is an organic practice. It relies on the interaction of several skills that are largely inseparable, and extremely difficult to integrate into writing practices if they're learned in pieces. I mean, it's easy to cut Mr. Frog open, pull out all his guts, and see what they do and how they interact. But try putting that bitch together again. So teaching writing -- especially first-year writing -- isn't about teaching skills. It's about setting goals, and engaging students in a process where they progress toward those goals in organized and deliberate ways, occasionally reflecting on what they've done and how well it's worked so that they can refine what they do in the future. Doing this is actually pretty easy, at least on the large scale. First, you set writing goals -- this is sometimes called "prose modeling," but all it means is that students read some example of the kinds of things you'd expect them to write (or try to write). And you -- and I mean you the class, not you the person -- talk about what makes those examples work, what they do well and what they don't. That way, those goals become explicit. And you keep them in front of your students all the time. Then, students write something like what they've read. We all know the process here: prewriting, drafting, rewriting (with this last divided into cuts and organization, followed by styling, followed by proofing). And while I have some prejudices about how my students best habituate themselves to this process, it's fair to say that just about anything works as long as it allows students to prewrite, draft, and revise according to their natural writerly idiosyncrasies. I don't care how my students prewrite -- they can outline, mindmap, freewrite, ouija board -- as long as they prewrite. Last, students need to reflect on and assess their process. After they finish a piece, they need to go back over it, see how happy they are with it, and toss that up against how they wrote it. That way, they can tweak their process to edge up what works and fix what doesn't. As long as you're rightly hitting those three Rs (reading, revision, and reflection), you'll see improvement -- at least as long as your pedagogy's sound. And that's actually a good closing point. You can't teach writing. All you can do is show students what good writing looks like, help them discover how it works, and make them aware of their process so they can tweak it as the nature and the quality of their writing demands. That's more like coaching. It's necessarily low on lecture and high on work with individual students. And a brief coda: If you're also charged with leading students through higher-order ("critical") thinking, giving them this rubric is tremendously useful -- it both sets clear goals and provides an aid to self-assessment.
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Aug 23, 2009 23:31
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Awesome. Quite helpful, thanks. Ugh, it's been so long since I've written anything that wasn't math that it took me a few minutes of memory-combing before I could remember what prewriting meant.
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Aug 24, 2009 01:49
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Aradekasta posted:Have you ever taught a scientific writing class? If you were to do so, is there anything in particular you'd change about your 'information management' approach (aside from the obvious content, journal databases, etc)? I've taught technical writing before, which isn't exactly the same thing. And I taught it long enough ago that I never figured a good method. My knee-jerk response is that I wouldn't change much for technical writing, since most collaborative technical writing processes need both a knowledge back end (e.g. a wiki for sharing information among writers) and a front end (the series of documents those writers produce and maintain). But for scientific writing, the story's likely very different. This is me speaking as someone who's never published anything that came out of an experiment, or even a piece of social science, so what I'm about to say could be way, way off. But for starters, the methods by which knowledge is produced in, say, experimental sciences make the "back end" look very different. Using experimental procedure means you've already effectively decided on a clearly defined set of information that's going to guide your common writing -- you've already got a hypothesis, data, conclusion, and so on. This means a "back end" wiki or other means of information sharing probably isn't essential, since if you put the experiment together as a group, you've already effectively got one. quote:Do you have to badger more traditional colleagues into working the way you're describing? The methods I described -- the highly collaborative, investigative, information-sharing back end (wiki), and its guidance of an essentially modular front-end document (a book of several essays on the same topic) -- are more or less unique to me, the people I've collaborated with, and the students I've taught. So in my world, if I want to have a book of several essays on 17th-century competitive eating, I get a bunch of people interested parties together, we all read what there is, and we use our interpretations of it to suggest divisions of or focuses within the topic. That all happens in a shared, back-end document. At some point, when our collaboration's seasoned and we've got clear topic divisions, we put together a book proposal. Assuming it gets approved, we write our individual pieces more or less in parallel, so that discoveries in one can help inform the content of another. Eventually, you get a book. Usually, though, the process involves someone pitching a book proposal to a publisher. On approval, whoever's pitched the project becomes editor, and solicits chapters (or chapter proposals) from anyone interested in writing them. In this design, the only person who sees the work as a whole is the editor. An individual chapter writer has no idea what each other one is doing. The result may be a collection of interesting essays, but they've rarely been seasoned by conversation. So I've written chapters for books done the usual way, and while I think I've done good work, it's rarely been the work that makes me want to get up at sunrise. I learn about whatever it is I'm writing on, but the reason I've been chosen to write on it's usually that I know a deal about it already. I developed my method to harness conference energy. There's this thing that happens sometimes, where you get on a panel and you find out that there are four or five or ten people who are all excited about the same topic -- usually, this is a topic that doesn't have a huge body of scholarship attached to it, and has a countable number of primary documents. What used to happen was that we'd talk about a book or a reading group, but then things would fizzle after a couple months -- communication among that many people is terribly difficult. So a few years ago I stated proposing wikis -- we could write up whatever we wanted on the topic, bring the wiki into classes as a teaching tool, and generally pursue independent scholarship on the same topic while simultaneously getting the benefit of everyone else's work. Now, that might turn into a book or it might not, but it's a fantastic way to learn about a topic that doesn't have a reading list. For me, that's really the point. Doing that, instead of setting up an editor-driven project that's going to quickly press a book out the door, takes people of a specific disposition and with common academic priorities. For hyperactive junior faculty, who want a CV like a roll of toilet paper, this isn't the way forward. But for those of us who want well-paced collaboration, I think this works better. So I don't badger anyone. If someone wants wide collaboration and a learning project, I'm glad to work with them this way. Frankly, I think it's better in every important respect. If I were going to be pithy, I'd say academics need more learning projects and fewer publication projects. If I were going to be less pithy more tolerant, I'd say that this collaborative method is really research-centered rather than writing-centered, and is especially strong in one particular (but, in my field, common) research context. quote:The collaborative process you present is frankly far more sophisticated than anything I've encountered in science - literature mining is one thing, but in terms of group collaboration the best we've done is email around a commented-up word document. This is partly a matter of project scope, project timeline, and numbers of participants. If you're running an article and you want it done quickly, you put someone in charge of drafting a document and reconciling it with changes that everyone else suggests. If the research is already done, your Word document could scale up to a long, long article or even a book. At least as long as your person in charge of integrating everyone else's edits can keep up with the work. But I doubt you'd take on a complicated research project this way. A commented-up Word document is a decent tool for collaborative writing, but a pretty lovely tool for sharing information among large numbers of people for whom changes in that information affect the direction of their further research. This is especially true in Lit, where I (at least) don't begin research with a focus, hypothesis, or timeline to publication in mind. I just read a bunch of stuff and wait for it to clump together. More than a few people using that method means there's a lot of game-changing discovery and categorical disagreement, especially in the early stages. So better to let each individual researcher write their manifestos, have everyone read them, and let the weight of opinion and further research show the way forward.
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Aug 24, 2009 04:25
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Aradekasta posted:Have you ever taught a scientific writing class? If you were to do so, is there anything in particular you'd change about your 'information management' approach (aside from the obvious content, journal databases, etc)? Do you have to badger more traditional colleagues into working the way you're describing? I'm a 5th year engineering major, and I've only encountered colaboration like this twice. Once is with a robotics club, where we liberally used Google Docs, SVN, and IRC to collaborate on several different projects. We experimented with Blogs, but they tended to be not very helpful for the amount of effort it took to maintain and write the entries (and our entries got drat long). We're moving to distributed version control (Mercurial instead of SVN) and looking at doing Blogs for meeting minutes instead of technical briefs (which are better done in wiki form anyways). Using Google Docs for writing abstracts and team papers is AMAZING. Doing pair programming online over version control can make for astounding amounts of progress, at the expense of flooding everyones inbox with SVN commits (we're hoping Mercurial will help with this). The other time is actually on my part time job with campus IT, where we use Google docs for coordinating major projects (like reimaging all classroom machines, or installing clickers in the physics hall to appease the very angry physics professors...I swear they have freaking clicker withdrawal if the system dies for more than 5 seconds). In both cases, the collaboration either worked well or worked miracles. This type of collaboration is very, very new and in industry I've yet to see such amazing tools come online. Google Docs in particular is totally impractical for classified or sensitive data, and frankly Google Docs is a very basic office suite with really awesome collaborative functionality. If Microsoft gives Office this type of capability, I'd imagine you would see this type of collaboration more often. Brainworm, this type of information management seems to be extremely robust for certain situations. Groupwork and Technical Writing in particular seem to be excellent fits for these new types of collaborative tools. Do you think these tools will find uses in other areas too? On that note, I'm becoming more and more interested in teaching engineering. I seem to have become a guru of sorts of my major, and people often come to me for help. I've come up with a number of ways to teach subjects that quite frankly I've not seen anywhere else. However, I'm having a very hard time coming up with ways to not make it so dry, even if the subject is thoroughly interesting to me. The best examples of engineering materials that aren't dry are self-help guides and Army/Navy guides for soldiers (and even then it's only marginally better than most textbooks). Do you have any insights on writing better textbooks (especially on technical material), or is that more or less a lost cause?
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Aug 24, 2009 04:33
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